These stories is part of the third act of this event. This tells the story of how the Eighth Doctor and the Ninth Doctor ended up in the Dark Times. This does take place before Act 1 but I recommend reading this in the following order.
Can I Help You?
T-Shirt
Can I Help You? was a short story printed on a T-shirt intended to tell part of the Time Lord Victorious narrative.
A wasteland. A dead world… No, there is a biodome, rising from the ash. Here, life teems and flourishes, with strange and lush plants, and many-winged insects with bright carapaces – and one solitary sentient creature, who spends its days watering the plants, talking to the insects, and tending this lonely garden. This is Inyit, the Last of the Kotturuh.
As for the book, while I read the whole thing weeks ago but made a mental note of where chapter 3 ended. I wasn’t a huge fan of “the battle” as it seems to be called by our guide. I don’t have to much to say about it only that I guess it felt a bit odd for a Doctor Who story to end up like this. But my main complaint (ignoring anything I may or may not know about the rest of the book) is it felt like the end of 10 as Time Lord Victorious for no real reason. At the end of chapter 3 he just declares something like “well that’s it, Time Lord Victorious has been defeated” while sitting there, as far as I can tell, objectively the winner. He defeated the Kotturuh, fought back the attack, and is now just free. And at that point I remember really wondering what the heck the direction for the event and book would be since that really felt like the end of it narratively. So… I guess come back in however many weeks to see how that actually went.
Here’s my spoiler filled review for the entire book if you want:
Very upset that the t-shirt didn’t get a topic of its own. The greatest piece of fiction in the entire Whoniverse and it gets lumbered in with something else. Disgraceful!
The greatest piece of Doctor Who clothing known to mankind, after Tom Baker’s underwear and at least until Shauny decides to release a TG hoodie. This brilliant piece of cloth glows in the dark, displays a creepy Ood up close and decides that spelling KILL in enormous letters is a good idea, while the actual story is barely readable behind the Ood and is presented in a wonderfully weird font.
Have I ever seen someone wear this in public? No. Would I wear it in public? Probably not. Is it relevant to the event? Absolutely not. Is it fun to talk about as if it’s the greatest thing ever created? Hell yeah!
This thing receives the dubious honour of being the first and only story to earn my very rare Unrated rating on TARDIS Guide. After all, how can I properly rate it without having worn it or seen it glow in the dark? Perhaps it’s made from the cheapest material imaginable. Or perhaps it’s woven from the finest Kashmir. Either way, testing it now would be pointless because surely the glow-in-the-dark effect must have worn off by this point. The item is no longer in mint condition.
So you see the dilemma I’m in? I desperately want to love something I cannot have, marvelling at the concept and the craftsmanship while simultaneously questioning the actual merits of the product. Am I thinking far too deeply about a simple T-shirt? Absolutely.
But this is what being a Doctor Who fan does to you.
The T Short is kinda funny, and I liked how it specified how they did some of the contracts, like ‘you cannot be bought out of a contract unless someone pays an extraordinary amount of money’.
As for All Flesh is Grass chapters 1-3, I liked it. The entire battle was interesting but most importantly to me, Eight and Nine were pretty much powerless to do anything during that. Ten didn’t believe they were really there and the two of them were just like ‘no trust me, he won’t do that…okay, he did do that….what?!?!’. It set up the stresses between the Doctors and their ‘allies’ pretty well too. We already saw Ten and Brian, but we see with the others Eight is mostly just at the whims of the Strategist while the vampires seem to at least care what Nine has to say.
Unit Field Notes are the awnser. But yeah there’s a lot of random stuff set durring the book, and some totally random stuff as a result of TLV. (There are also some stories not in that guide if you want to pad the numbers further)
Oh I’m not worried about it so much as I am just surprised as we’ve done so many stories already. I’m in it for the journey, not for the badge at the end of it.
The first three chapters (and prologue) of All Flesh is Grass were an interesting read because it’s one of the few times I’ve felt this event has actually bothered to try to tie things together. The prologue echoed the early short stories with the Kotturuh - a fascinating race barely explored since the bloody Daleks came on to the scene - and then the three chapters looking at the Tenth Doctor’s confrontation with Eight and Nine tied nicely into Eight’s audios and Nine’s comic strip adventure with the vampires (I liked how this is set while Rose is recovering from the vampire virus).
It did feel a bit weird having the Doctors actually referred to as the Tenth Doctor, the Ninth Doctor and the Eighth Doctor in the prose as those are ‘names’ I tend to associate with how we refer to them outside of the narrative but I can’t actually think how else you would do it (it’s been ages since I read a multi-Doctor story so I don’t know how they are differentiated in Day of the Doctor or the Five Doctors novelisations).
I’m trying to revise the way I’m thinking about this event. I think I went in with the misapprehension that it would be an ongoing, linear narrative weaving in and out of the different mediums but I think I’ve realised it’s more of a patchwork that is building up to a whole. I think that might improve my view of the story arc moving forward.
Couldn’t agree more really. They’re such an interesting concept that I wish were fully fleshed out.
Yeah.. I think one of TLV’s downfalls was the trying so hard to make each medium stand on its own too much, therefore sacrificing some of the interconnectivity. Doom’s Day improved on this a tad, and to an extent Circuit Breaker has too. With the latter however it feels they’re wasting time in each medium by going over the basics of the arc each time, though I can see why it is needed.
I think the Day of the Doctor novelization handled that particularly well. Each Doctor pretty much picked traits of the others to address them with or think of them about. Like ‘sand shoes’, ‘daddy’s suit’, etc.
I finally have time to re-read the beginning of this book and I remember why I last thought that it was the highlight of the event. It is the glue that makes the event come together.
I am also glad that @deltaandthebannermen is starting to enjoy it more. I feel like all my recommendations to him don’t work for him.
